02 Aurelia and Montejo

Advanced Lafferty. What comes next won’t depend on it.

Not much has been written about Aurelia, but of the handful of things said about it, by far the most interesting and intellectually strongest is Gregorio Montejo’s essay “Eudaimonism in R. A. Lafferty’s Aurelia,” which appeared in Feast of Laughter in 2015. Anyone who wants to read Lafferty seriously should understand its argument. Today I want to walk through that argument, say where I agree, and mark a few places where I think it needs to be supplemented, because I think it is largely correct, and because I also (rudely) think correctness is not adequacy,

Most of my quibbles would be unfair, since they go beyond what Montejo sets out to do. He is writing about a specialized topic for a general audience, though he uses academic conventions, and there is no reason he should make distinctions that might distract from his main points. As I see them, those points are two. First, Aurelia must be understood in relation to both her life during her assignment on Planet X and her teaching, and the teaching must be read through her life. Without both, the novel will not hold together. Second, Aurelia’s homilies converge on the meaning of life, which is happiness, and Lafferty’s view of this, in its general form, is Aristotelian-Thomistic. Montejo’s essay can be found here.

To start, some evidence codes that will help us unpack Montejo’s argument.

And, again, the big takeaway:

The argument:

1.1. The relation between kerygma and didache has become immensely complicated since the distinction was made nearly a century ago by the Protestant theologian C. H. Dodd. I find it a useful analytic distinction, but it isn’t convincing to me as a first-century operationalized reality in the Church given the scholarship done after Dodd. But read Dodd if you haven’t. No one is clearer, and he is always terse and interesting. Essential knowledge for the educated Christian.

What does this mean? Well, it means we need conceptual space. A third category will be needed for Lafferty’s novel. In the first thinking-aloud post, I called that third category anamnesis. Remembering as a process and theme in the Whole Lafferty is centipedal, and Lafferty’s novel is being dispatched to the amnesia-filled audience of Flatland 1982 who loves science fiction. Postfiguration reawakens in some amnestic science fiction reader that Compensation happened, if it does its job.

1.2. I agree with all this except the last point. I see no evidence that Aurelia’s death is sacrificial, at least if sacrifice requires willing self-offering. She doesn’t offer herself. She says it is silly!* Christ goes to the cross willingly in the New Testament after asking that the cup be taken from him. One could say that Aurelia is a sacrifice in the Old Testament sense: offered unwillingly, she dies as an animals dies. A stretch. I think the issue is again complicated by Lafferty’s development of a postfiguration technique that he uses a handful of times (“Ishmael into the Barrens,” “And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire,” “And Mad Undancing Bears,” “Horns on Their Heads,” etc.) Aurelia is a girl whom Lafferty subjects to postfiguration. She is not a sacrifice. That is brutally unsentimental and why I love RAL.

1.3. I agree.

1.4. I agree. I would add that one will not understand Lafferty’s own didactic intent, as distinct from Aurelia’s homilies, unless one sees that the kerygma-didache relation within Aurelia is being figured through anamnesis. The original kerygma-didache relation, whatever it was in the early Church, does not have this feature, because it witnesses typological fulfillment. It does not postfigure it but testifies to it and teaches it as a second phase process (if we want to keep Dodd’s stipulation of didache).

2.1. Lafferty says this consistently, both in the fiction and in interviews. His eudaimonism, however, is elusive, because he is, as he puts it, often rowdy-dow about happiness. Aristotle has leisure, and Aquinas has play, but neither is rowdy dow about anything. In Aristotle, the highest happiness is contemplative; in Aquinas, perfect happiness is the beatific vision, the seeing of God’s essence. A love of the rowdy-dow, where the wildness of creation is celebrated, is one of the aspects of RAL that makes him so surprising and interesting as a Catholic artist and appealing to non-Christians.

2.2. Lafferty says this, but it is a partial statement. He is not giving an outline of the Summa as a whole. Rather, he is mostly providing an outline of the Secunda Pars, with a few highly important exceptions. Much that matters to the kerygma of Aurelia, angels, for instance, belong to other parts of the Summa and are not outlined in the homilies, but they do inform the action of the kerygma and anamnesis in the book.

2.3. There are difficult questions here, turning on man’s proportionate end, that I will address in the next post when I discuss Lafferty’s primary source for the novel, Walter Farrell, O.P. The issue is the relation between imperfect happiness and perfect happiness. Montejo no doubt understands this, but he places two thinkers with differing views in a footnote as shorthand (I assume), and the difference is worth drawing out.

2.4. I agree.

3.1. I would add that the formulas are exact chapter titles from Walter Farrell’s My Way of Life. More on this on the next post.

3.2. Uncontroversial claim.

3.3. Agree, but the homilies do introduce non-Thomistic material as well as reinterpret Thomistic material. For instance, Lafferty on law is not Aquinas on law, in my view, and the cognitive/appetitive composition is more properly handled at Ia q. 16 or Ia q. 79-82. Reasonable people can disagree on the last point.

3.4. Agree. The problem is that an educated reader will know Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s arguments about the summum bonum, so this does not explain the novel as a novel. One needs something like postfiguration unless one’s goal is simply to teach the general shape of some of Aquinas’s thought, which is what Aurelia is doing, but without the rest of the novel, you are better off with a Great Course from the Teaching Company. The homilies do not go deep. They are far less deep than a survey in a freshman-level college course. But Lafferty is doing something else. He is staging Aurelia’s teaching. In other words, one does not sit at Aurelia’s feet and learn from her only; one watches her teach others who learn from her, if one already knows the tradition within which Lafferty is working: scripture, philosophy, and theology. Then one marvels at the defamiliarization.

4.1. Perhaps, but postfiguration complicates this. To read Aurelia simply as a Christ figure reduces her, as does seeing her as just a cruciform life. Aurelia’s is a character but we are invited to think of her as a person. Christology and narrative do not consume her as St. John does the little scroll, which is relevant to Aurelia’s consumption of the seeds and antler nubs. The novel is clearly having it both ways. Aurelia is postfigured through Christ, but she is also, in important ways, just a person, a girl who often does not know what she is doing. I know Montejo probably sees this “fictional fact” about her personhood, but postfiguration keeps Aurelia from being didactically consumed narratively as a golden martyr.

4.2. I agree.

4.3. This is an interesting point to me. I agree with Montejo’s statement, but I think it can obscure the oddness of Aurelia’s life.

A worked example.

At one point, a lecherous older man attempts the “funny uncle” routine with Aurelia, and she gives him an “instrumental knot.” To put it plainly, she ties his penis, literally or metaphorically, into a knot. No one can untie it.

The doctor then asks if there is a way to untie it, warning that Gifford might die. Aurelia writes down the instructions, but the doctor notices one final catch.

This is the power of binding and loosing that Christ possesses and bestows on St. Peter in Matthew 16.9: "I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." The keys themselves show up at the end of the novel as a double-key that parallels the yin-yang and double dart.

As one rabbi said to another, “How do you Christianize a dick joke?”

Let’s look at what is happening. Lafferty works the binding authority through sexual parody. The demonic parody is de-sacralized because it is anamnesis for the reader who catches the allusion, not kerygma: the reader is meant to recall the binding power of Christ, but the image has been so radically postfigured, sexualized, and made comical that one can hardly call it simply part of the cruciform shape of a Christlike life. The proclamation is not that Aurelia tied a funny uncle member into a knot, which is why one needs more than kerygma/didache to make sense of how Lafferty innovates literary form. He burlesques sacred scripture without disrespecting it, something made possible by postfigural distance.

4.4. “Required” is too strong, and finally not explanatory. What is the force of the requirement? I understand what Montejo is saying, and in one sense I agree with him. But if Aurelia is to be read as a novel that can be discussed paragraph by paragraph, one needs considerably more. One needs a tool like postfiguration. One needs both proclamation and reclamation. Again, this goes beyond the remit Montejo sets for himself, so it is only a quibble, though significant.

5.1. I find this uncontroversial.

5.2. I find this uncontroversial as well.

5.3. It is important to understand that the Mystery of Iniquity is not merely sin, but apocalypse (2 Thessalonians 2).

5.4. I agree, though the nature of the relation between sin and eudaimonism in Aurelia would benefit from being unpacked. It is a major problem in Thomism, and it bears on the larger question of whether a Thomistic ethics, as distinct from a Thomistic theology, is possible at all. This is relevant to how one receives the novel’s homilies as a reader of Aurelia and turns on how one understands the duplex beatitudo. Can a secular reader take the homilies as a freestanding ethics of happiness, ordered to man’s natural/proportionate end? Or must they finally be received as irreducible theology, as in Aurelia’s claim that each person is an arc?

Consider what is at issue.

In the controversy over the possibility of a purely philosophical Thomistic ethics, the really big question is whether an autonomous moral philosophy can be validly abstracted from Aquinas’s theological framework without distorting his thought. On one side are figures such as Jacques Maritain, Denis Bradley, and Alasdair MacIntyre, who argue that a purely philosophical, Aristotelian-style ethics is incompatible with Aquinas’s deepest theological commitments. On this view, such an ethics depends on a natural end, eudaimonia, achievable through autonomous human action; but Aquinas holds that humanity’s only true ultimate end is the supernatural beatific vision, and that the fallen human will requires divine grace to achieve genuine moral goodness. This brings us back to the curious fact that Lafferty does not really talk about the beatific vision.

On the other side, defenders of an autonomous Thomistic ethics, such as Ralph McInerny, Wolfgang Kluxen, and new-natural-law theorists like John Finnis, argue that it is both possible and necessary to extract from Aquinas a valid this-worldly moral philosophy. They hold that Aquinas’s accounts of imperfect natural beatitude, natural inclinations, and the first principles of practical reason provide a coherent, universally accessible ethical foundation that does not require theological commitment or dependence on revealed doctrine.

My own view belongs with the first camp. It is also where one finds Walter Farrell, Lafferty’s source, and the subject of the next post. Lafferty, oblique as always, leaves this all-important question strategically underspecified because he wants to awaken the reader, not preach and teach. Aurelia herself does it, another reason to see the kerygma/didache distinction as being analytic, not metafictionally actual, as it were.

The old guys said, concedo, distinguo, nego, addo for a clearer picture.

*Complicated by the fact that silly is a Scottish word and Aurelia is punning on it as she dies next to the Scottishly named Cousin Clootie.